These Few Precious Days (10 page)

NOT THAT JACK WOULD EVER
be entirely free of pain. Returning to a hero’s welcome on Capitol Hill, Jack still came home each evening and climbed into a hospital bed. “But during the day he’d walk all around the Senate,” she said, “looking wonderful and tan in his gray suit.”

It was also during this time that Jack, growing bored during long stretches of confinement, began compiling material for an article on the lives of politicians who at some point risked everything to make the right choice. While he recuperated at the family’s Palm Beach mansion, where Joe had transformed an entire wing into a hospital ward staffed with nurses and orderlies, Jackie helped her husband expand the article into a book. Soon they were joined in this effort by Jack’s eager young assistant, Ted Sorensen.

Sorensen’s contribution would always be a matter of debate. Jackie, knowing that Jack had written portions of the book in longhand on yellow legal pads while continuing his recovery at Merrywood, resented the fact that Sorensen did little to quell rumors that he had actually written
Profiles in Courage
. “Jack forgave so quickly,” she said later, “but I never forgave Ted Sorensen.” However, JFK himself obviously believed Sorensen’s contribution was substantial. According to Jackie, Jack signed over all royalties to
Profiles in Courage
to Sorensen.

Profiles in Courage
became an overnight bestseller and would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for biography. Just as important, it served to elevate the young senator even further above his Senate brethren. Now Jack, meditating on the larger issues of morality and conscience in the public arena, was viewed as something more than your run-of-the-mill politician. Jack was a
statesman
.

“War hero, Harvard-educated, from one of the richest and most famous families in the nation, and now a Pulitzer Prize winner?” Smathers said. “Oh, did I mention good-looking, with a gorgeous, classy, and
smart
wife to boot? All the rest of us could do was just sit back and watch.”

The Sorensen issue aside, Jack did not hesitate to publicly thank Jackie for her contribution to
Profiles
. The book would not have been possible, he wrote, “without the encouragement, assistance and criticisms offered from the very beginning by my wife, Jacqueline, whose help during all the days of my convalescence I cannot ever adequately acknowledge.”

That summer, Jack bolstered his image even more with a seven-week tour of Europe. Yet again, Jackie proved a valuable asset, charming Pope Pius XII, French premier Georges Bidault, and, at a party thrown by Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis aboard his legendary yacht
Christina,
even Winston Churchill.

Jack was eager to meet his idol, even though there was no love lost between Churchill and Papa Joe. As FDR’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in the years leading up to World War II, isolationist Joe—already suspect because of his Irish roots—had argued against U.S. involvement in the looming fight against the Nazis.

On board the
Christina
fifteen years later, Churchill now appeared to be giving Joe’s son the cold shoulder—although it was hard to tell if it was intentional. “The poor man was really quite ga-ga then,” Jackie said. “It was hard going. I felt so sorry for Jack that evening because he was meeting his hero, only he met him too late.”

That didn’t explain, however, why Churchill seemed to lavish so much more attention on the other guests—particularly Jackie. “I don’t know,” Jackie said, glancing at her husband’s white dinner jacket. “Maybe he thought you were the waiter, Jack.”

If Jackie had hoped to have Jack all to herself during their European idyll, she was sadly mistaken. This time, it appeared that Jack even made a play for Jackie’s sister Lee, right under the nose of Lee’s first husband Michael Canfield, adopted son of the legendary publisher Cass Canfield. Gore Vidal insisted that Canfield claimed “there were times when I think she [Lee] went perhaps too far, you know? Like going to bed with Jack in the room next to mine in the South of France and then boasting about it.”

Whatever constituted the last straw, Jackie was telling their traveling companions that she was no longer willing to put up with Jack’s unfettered cheating. According to Peter Ward, a British friend who rendezvoused with them in Antibes, “they were split. She said, ‘I’m never going back’ in my presence several times.”

Yet, less than a week later, Jackie and Jack were all smiles as they dined with Lee and Michael Canfield in Monaco. Jack had agreed to stop his philandering, but only because of what Jackie told him: she was expecting a child.

They told no one. “Jackie was a firm believer in waiting until it was obvious—at least three months—before making any sort of announcement,” Janet Auchincloss said. “Just the immediate families knew.” But in October, shortly after moving into Hickory Hill and starting to decorate the nursery, Jackie miscarried in her third month. Once again, Jackie and Jack made little of their loss and simply moved on. “They really,” Yusha Auchincloss said, “didn’t share their feelings with anyone.”

Three months later, Jackie was expecting again. The child was due in September 1956, but it was clear that politics, not fatherhood, was the first thing on Jack’s mind. Adlai Stevenson, who had lost the presidency to Dwight Eisenhower four years earlier, once again had the nomination sewn up. As Democrats prepared to hold their convention in Chicago that August, however, the second spot on the ticket was up for grabs.

For months leading up to the convention, Jack and his minions lobbied hard to make it happen. At first, they left Jackie alone. “That was perfectly fine with her,” said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Stevenson adviser who would become a key member of JFK’s brain trust. “Jackie resented us all on some level, I’m sure. We were always underfoot, popping up out of nowhere, invading their privacy.”

According to Hyannis Port friend and neighbor Larry Newman, Jackie simply “loathed politics and politicians.” Gore Vidal agreed that the intensity of Jackie’s feelings went far beyond mere resentment. “Jackie saw there was nothing glamorous about that world. It was just sleazy,” Vidal said, “and boring.” Whenever “the pols came into view,” Chuck Spalding added, “you could see this desperate ‘get me out of here’ look in her eyes.”

It was a look Jack’s team of hard-core pols and tweedy Ivy League intellectuals knew all too well after the newlyweds rented their first home, a narrow nineteenth-century townhouse at 3321 Dent Place in Georgetown. These invaders strolled in and out of the house unannounced, left the toilet seats up, ground mud into the rugs, dropped cigarette butts everywhere—and smashed several of Jackie’s favorite Sèvres ashtrays.

“I hate it, hate it, hate it!” Jackie complained to her friend Tish Baldrige after being trapped once again in the bathroom wearing nothing but a negligee, waiting for the coast to clear. “There are meetings in the living room, meetings in the kitchen, meetings in the hallways, and meetings on the stairs. Step outside for a breath of fresh air, and they are sitting on the front steps. Where am I supposed to go to get away from them?” At one point, Jackie told Baldrige that she was thinking of getting “a bullhorn and just blasting them every time I want to walk down the front stairs or use the bathroom.”

Now that she was left to her own devices in the Virginia countryside, Jackie set out to transform the inside of Hickory Hill from an Eisenhower era, wall-to-wall eyesore into an antique-filled showplace. She paid special attention to the nursery, furnishing it in shades of yellow and white so that it would be appropriate for either gender. “She may have felt a little isolated out there, all alone while Jack was out in the world shaking things up,” Jamie Auchincloss said. “She was very nervous about losing the baby, too.”

It didn’t help, Rose Kennedy pointed out, that Jackie responded to stress by chain-smoking two packs of Salems a day (Jackie later switched to L&Ms, and then to Newport menthols). “You really shouldn’t smoke, my dear,” Rose would admonish her daughter-in-law in that unforgettable cackle. “It’s not healthy for the baby, you know.” Jackie’s response was to do a dead-on impression of Rose the minute she left the room—but not before lighting up. “She had a wicked sense of humor and was a superb mimic,” George Plimpton said. “Her imitation of Rose even had Jack on the floor, absolutely convulsed with laughter.”

Rose had a point, of course. Jackie’s obstetrician, Dr. John Walsh, had repeatedly urged her to quit smoking, at least until after she had the baby. “My words fell on deaf ears,” Walsh said of Jackie’s smoking habit, which began back at Miss Porter’s. “It was just a blind spot with her,” added Dr. Janet Travell. “Yes, a lot of pregnant women did smoke in those days, but even then it was widely frowned upon. The medical community certainly knew you were risking complications if you smoked.”

Still, Travell conceded that Jackie was “under a lot of stress, and apparently trying to kick a serious nicotine addiction wasn’t something she could deal with at the time.” For his part, Jack had no serious objection to Jackie’s smoking habit, as long as it was done out of sight and away from cameras. She, conversely, went so far as to encourage Jack’s cigar smoking (he had a particular fondness for Havana Upmanns) as a way of masking her cigarette smoke—a ruse she continued in the White House. “If anyone asks,” Jackie shrugged, “I just blame his smelly stogies.”

Jackie’s hopes of being left alone for the rest of her pregnancy were dashed when Jack pleaded with her to join him at the convention in Chicago. When she balked, telling him that she was concerned she might miscarry again, Jack pointed out that Bobby’s wife, Ethel, who was also eight months pregnant, would be there. (Jack’s sister Patricia, married to the movie actor Peter Lawford, was even further along in her pregnancy and decided to remain home in Los Angeles.)

Not wanting to disappoint her husband or exclude herself from this important part of his life, Jackie accompanied Jack to Chicago. As it turned out, while Jack worked the convention floor Jackie was left to fend for herself at a breakfast for the Massachusetts delegation and a cocktail party for campaign wives.

Jack lost the vice presidential spot to Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver on the third ballot. Jackie, emotionally drained and physically exhausted, stood sobbing next to Jack as he thanked supporters gathered in their suite at Chicago’s Conrad Hilton Hotel. “It’s all too much to bear,” she told Smathers. “I don’t know how you all do it.”

At that point, Smathers was surprised at how hard both Jack and Jackie were taking the defeat, but he wasn’t particularly worried about the baby. “None of us knew about the first miscarriage,” he explained. “Jack never said a thing. They kept that all private. Since Jackie was young and the Kennedys seemed to have a knack for producing children, there seemed to be no cause for concern.”

Immediately after the convention, Jack told Jackie that he would not be returning with her to Hickory Hill. Instead, he was going to join his parents as they vacationed on the French Riviera, and then cruise the Mediterranean aboard a yacht with his brother Teddy and Smathers.

“What do you mean, Jack?” she asked incredulously. After all, she had done everything he had asked of her. “I’m due in a month,” she pleaded. “Please don’t leave me alone. I’m frightened.”

Jack was frightened, too—of Joe. The senior Kennedy had angrily warned Jack that it was too soon to try for national office, that he must not squander his political capital making a futile vice presidential bid. Now JFK felt he had to make amends with his father.

IT WAS LESS EASY TO
explain why Jack also felt free to take a Mediterranean cruise while his wife was back home about to have a baby. “For God’s sake, Jackie,” he said—Salinger, Spalding, Lowe, and others recalled that JFK routinely prefaced his remarks with “For God’s sake, Jackie” or “Oh my God, kid” whenever he was irritated with her—“I’ll only be gone for nine days. There are lots of people around to take care of you. You’ll be fine until I get back.” It wasn’t as if he felt it was necessary even to be there when Jackie gave birth; Joe, for all his involvement in their adult lives, had not been present at the birth of any of his nine children.

But Jackie wasn’t just worried about the baby. George Smathers conceded that Jack was going to have “his share of female company” on the trip, and that Jackie knew it. In the end, Smathers said, “there just wasn’t anything she could do about it.”

Instead, Jackie went home to Hammersmith Farm—and to her mother. While his wife tried to regain her strength back in Newport, Jack enjoyed the company of his friends and several female guests aboard a chartered forty-foot yacht. Jack had personally invited several of the women aboard but seemed most interested in one: “Pooh,” an attractive Manhattan socialite who only spoke of herself in the third person: “Pooh is so glad you asked me to come along,” “Pooh would like a daiquiri.”

On the morning of August 23, 1956, Janet Auchincloss awoke to hear her daughter screaming for help. She pushed open the door to Jackie’s room and found her on the floor, clutching her stomach. Jackie was rushed by ambulance to Newport Hospital, where doctors moved quickly to perform an emergency caesarean.